Word: burnett
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From the day they first began working together in an advertising agency 24 years ago, William Burnett Benton and Chester Bowles blended like benedictine and brandy. Within eleven years Benton & Bowles, still in their 30s, had built an ad agency of their own into an $18 million-a-year business...
Cruel & Unusual. In Detroit, Walter J. Burnett got a divorce after testifying that while he was at work his wife drank all his beer and whisky, replaced the bottles after filling them with colored water...
...Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" The speaker, a blimpish Hollywood Britisher in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, sucked petulantly on his whisky & soda and stared at his outdated copy of Horizon, Cyril Connolly's British monthly for intellectuals. If he had lived long enough to investigate the matter, he might have wondered how Scottie Wilson, a half-educated furniture dealer turned artist, had ever made his list of the big guns in the 20th Century highbrow arsenal in the first place...
Savagery Plus. Two Worlds and Their Ways is not Compton-Burnett's best; it does not, for instance, reach and hold the high and extraordinary level of its predecessor, Bullivant and the Lambs (TIME, July 19). It has many more tedious and barren stretches, but they are frequently relieved by Novelist Compton-Burnett's most characteristically brilliant qualities. There are flashes of darting spite ("I hope I am not disturbing you at your luncheon, Mrs. Cassidy." "Thank you, Miss James. It is so kind to cling to the hope") and devastating responses to thoughtless queries ("Why should...
Readers will find here, gleaming oddly in its transplanted setting, the pattern of the classical Greek drama which was Author Compton-Burnett's favorite reading as a child. Like Sophocles' Oedipus, struggling to gauge the future and discovering that it twists horribly back into his own past, the characters in Two Worlds march blindly to their fate, doomed from the start but always demanding, with the eloquence and dignity of Aeschylean heroes, their right to respect as well as humiliation. They always get plenty of both from Ivy Compton-Burnett...